TalkPHP - Tutorial on writing Website Scrapers

TalkPHP (http://www.talkphp.com/forums.php)

- Script Giveaway (http://www.talkphp.com/script-giveaway/)

- - Tutorial on writing Website Scrapers (http://www.talkphp.com/script-giveaway/2344-tutorial-writing-website-scrapers.html)

Tutorial on writing Website Scrapers

This article discusses about how to write a website scraper using PHP for web site data extraction. The concepts taught can be applied and programmed in Java, C#, etc. Basically any language that has a powerful string processing capability. This article will teach you the basics of website scraping. The article will further cover a tutorial to find web ranking from Yahoo.com search engine.

Steps involved to write a scraping program

Visit the URL
Understand the pattern
Validate the structure of pattern on different URLs
Write the program
Test the program using various input parameters

Full post:

Writing Website Scrapers in PHP | Geek Files

If you're scraping content from websites (that is: HTML) I guess string processing via strpos() and regular expressions are a thing of the past.

If you're using PHP5 it's very easy to scrape content using the DOM Functions. All you need is a DOMDocument object, then you call the DOMDocument->loadHTML() function and you can navigate the DOM using functions like getElementById, getElementsByTagName.. just like JavaScript. :-)

A nice little start on the subject, and as DeMo said there is always more than one way to skin a cat (as the saying goes).

Using DOM & XPath, we could condense:

PHP Code:


		
			
$pos = strpos($str, "<div id=\"popsearchbd\"");

$pos = $pos + strlen("<div id=\"popsearchbd\"");

 

if($pos == false) {

    echo "No information available";

}

else {

 

    while(1) {

        $pos = strpos($str, "fp-buzzmod\">", $pos);

 

        if($pos === false) {

            break;

        }

 

        $pos = $pos + strlen("fp-buzzmod\">");

        $temppos = $pos;

        $pos = strpos($str, "</a>", $pos);

 

        $datalength = $pos - $temppos;

 

        $data = substr($str, $temppos , $datalength);

        echo $data;

        echo "\n";

    }

 

}

into:

PHP Code:


		
			
$links = $xpath->query('//div[@id="popsearchbd"]//a');

Now, depending on your skill level or experience with XPath (and/or string functions!) the latter might be even more scary that Sunhil's version! One thing to note is that (at least for the Yahoo site in this tutorial) a User Agent is required, else Yahoo will send back different HTML (not containing the top searches!). However, in the tutorial Sunhil sends along a UA string in the headers so that's ok. ::-)